Chocolate has played both the and the in national health and wellness conversations recently. One day, word on the dessert aisle was that cocoa could , and the next, we were told that chocolate is—no joke—. What gives?
The research can get confusing, but one thing is for sure: We (the general population) love chocolate—and sometimes, we love it in absurdly large quantities. It's not just since Hershey's started its factory either. Apparently, our obsession dates back to , when cacao beans were offered up in Mayan dowries (nice to see that our wooing techniques haven't changed all that much) and even exchanged as currency in some early American civilizations (now that would be the dream).
Today, it's become the most for teens in the U.S., and even us adults gobble up about per year. Not surprising when you think about how much we self-prescribe chocolate to treat general sadness; give it to others to show affection; and keep emergency stashes on-hand for late nights, breakups, or particularly bad bouts of PMS.
With the national obesity rate rising , scientists have been digging deeper into the ways in which food affects the brain—and, in turn, how the brain can dictate our intake of food. can look a lot like drug addiction: going to great lengths to acquire the goods (midnight chocolate run, anyone?), continuing to eat despite negative consequences, and trying and failing to quit on several occasions.
But the similarities don't stop there—both addictive drugs and particularly tasty foods have been found to , a neurotransmitter , in a region of the brain that's been dubbed the "reward circuit."
After a while, the reward circuit starts reacting to just thinking about these pleasurable things. Once you start associating these feel-good things with good feels, your brain begins to demand them. In , a group of women exhibited this response while looking at a picture of a chocolate milkshake.
This could just be that the chocolate we eat is typically loaded with sugar and fat, but according to one , it may have to do with its interaction with a particular molecule called that exists in our brain, looks a lot like endorphins, and may be causing our addiction.
In this case, researchers gave rats a few M&Ms to munch on (don't try this at home!) and, lo and behold, enkephalin levels in the brain started to rise (yes, they are rats, not humans, but it's still interesting). To see the effects of the mystery molecule, scientists injected the rats with more enkephalin, and they started binging like there was no tomorrow, indicating that this substance that's naturally in chocolate is also . In other words, if you give a mouse a (chocolate) cookie, you better have more on hand.
But while there are a lot of similarities between drug use and chocolate consumption, there are also some key differences. For one thing, there isn't a whole lot of evidence to show that we can develop chocolate in the same way that we can develop drug dependence. And even though some of us think it's a medical issue, menstrual chocolate cravings and "chocoholism" are pretty . While other countries produce and consume more chocolate than the U.S., very few others feel as simultaneously passionate and defenseless about it as we do.
Although eating chocolate nonstop might not be quite the same thing as having a drug addiction, it's still important to examine the factors—physiological, cultural, and environmental—that might increase our consumption to the point of abuse. Chocolate is often depicted as a go-to indulgence as well as something we're supposed to feel guilty about, and the image of the helpless chocoholic surfaces again and again, often in good fun, in and . So maybe the feeling that we're going cuckoo for cocoa comes, at least partly, from outside of our bodies too.
And with suggesting that constant exposure to stress can hike up your intake of highly caloric and fatty foods, it's safe to say we're living in an environment where all signs point to chocolate. After we get that dopamine rush, we feel we've done a bad, bad thing. Yet somehow, we do it again.
At the end of the day, it's important to remember that chocolate alone isn't the enemy. It's got some addictive properties for sure, but so do exercise and . (And we're definitely not going to tell you to cut those out of your life!) As frustratingly inconclusive as this sounds, there are a lot of elements at play here—but having an awareness that there are a lot of things pushing us to eat (and overeat) the sweet treat might at least help us develop a healthier relationship with it.
Taz Bhatia, M.D. Frances Largeman-Roth, R.D.N.